A theory that requires ad hoc stipulations about which counterfactual variations 'count' violates the Humean demand for a purely extensional, non-intensional reduction of causal facts.

?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.

No one has weighed in yet. Be the first to share reasons for or against this statement.

Causal facts: True statements about what causes what—facts about which events or things make other things happen.
Humean: "Humean" refers to ideas based on the philosophy of David Hume, an 18th-century Scottish philosopher who argued that our knowledge comes from what we directly experience through our senses, not from abstract reasoning alone. A key Humean idea is that we cannot truly prove that cause and effect exist in the world—we only observe that one thing regularly follows another, and our minds make the connection. Hume's skeptical approach to knowledge and causation has influenced centuries of philosophical debate about how we understand reality.
ad hoc stipulations(used to criticize theories that seem to patch themselves up artificially): Special rules you make up on the spot just to fix a problem in your theory, rather than deriving them from your main principles.
counterfactual(Modal logic and epistemology): A conditional statement concerning what would be the case if some antecedent condition were true, evaluated across possible worlds; contraposition does not hold in general for counterfactuals.

Based on where you are in your exploration